Finding Great Jobs for Great People

I was raised at the back-end of a black road. Our games were played in the dirt and dust…and occasionally the mud and slush. It was here that my youth delivered its lessons and challenges… mostly from the endless ball games…all of them…and of course the crazy sometimes violent fights that entertained us between and during our games. Out of this came character lessons of loyalty, pride, work, honesty, self-respect…truth and fear; packaged in those days of summer, outside from dawn to dusk as scores got settled only to begin anew.
The rest of the year it was about the school days offering up a warm place to go and the continued challenges of forging friends and enemies with captains and soldiers each building reputations and sucking up the consequences and the spoils. We learned from the glory and the embarrassment that came with each changing year. And it molded us. Taught us how to behave. Taught us about honor, respect and to have a work ethic.
So, what’s become of us that our views of character…of character and values upon which the responsibilities and journey to adulthood are drafted?
I’m watching this slow, on-again off-again recovery as my clients begin asking us to provide them with great candidates and we struggle to find willing, capable people and I’m wondering what’s going on? People refusing to leave unemployment because if they accept a job they’ll forfeit the government paying 65% of their COBRA benefits added to the overwhelming cost of day care that they figure they’re financially better off staying on unemployment (which now lasts a couple of years) collecting two-thirds of their working pay and staying home with their kids. Then there are people who do need to work, accepting jobs that are “temp to hire” and when the client offers to hire them at an increase in salary, the candidate demands more…more salary, more benefits, more, more, more….until it frustrates everyone involved and we begin our search all over again. And our candidate chooses to sit home rather than get paid to work, not giving a thought to honoring their word or their commitment. These are just a couple of experiences that give us insight into our culture that cause us to re-examine our thinking about how people work and live and the choices we make.
We tell our clients to look for strong core values in anyone they hire. We can always improve someone’s skills but there’s no fixing someone’s true character. Companies should build on these character traits as the foundation of the culture they build with their work force. But we all struggle these days to understand how some people think. I believe it has to do with their beginning.
The tides of change in our culture make doing the right thing harder with each passing day. Walking the line…bellying up to the bar with your money on the table…nothing to hide, trusting human nature…seems that men…who can leave their money on the bar... number fewer by the day. We keep thinking we can learn our lessons from a cold man’s stone. It’s just too often too late for too much of it.
So, a perfect game is ruined by an umpire’s mistake. And a young pitcher responds to the disappointment and obvious slight to his history with dignity and grace suggesting that “it’s a mistake, that’s all”… the umpire searches him out and apologizes admitting he made a “terrible mistake”…and the umpire is humbled by the fans cheering him the following day and the young pitcher’s grace. And what’s everyone talk about? There are editorials and commentaries calling for instant replay to solve this terrible injustice. It’s said that “perfection can be the enemy of good”. Let's not "paint the lily" here. Think about the world you want to live in...a world where the character of accepting how things may not always work out perfectly or the sterile, robot’s game of perfection where we make no room for humanity or for people being people. This is one of those things that is already perfect. Let's not change perfection. Let’s celebrate grace, good will, honest work and man’s humanity toward their fellow man...then let’s move on. We can find jobs for some great people who want and need to work. As we mold our young and mentor people entering the workforce…we can reinforce the traditional values that made us envy previous generations and helped build our country. Let's fix our character now and in the meantime maybe we’ll actually fix some other stuff while we're at it. I heard something about an oil problem in the Gulf we can take a look at....